Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dhall Configuration Language

dhall-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 192 posts

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#21

Post by rowanG077 »

svnpenn wrote: post #5

{ home = "/home/bill" , privateKey = "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519" , publicKey = "/home/blil/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" } This is the most awkward abuse of formatting I've seen in a long time. Just allow/require a final trailing comma, and this nonsense goes away

I feel this is the superior way to format something like that. Trailing commas are nothing but an ugly hack.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#22

Post by bandyaboot »

alephaleph wrote: post #14
junon wrote: post #10

> Can you spot the mistake? Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious. Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.

How could they make the mistake obvious? It's a mistake in a string value!

It had me confused too. I figured I was looking for a syntax error in the config format since it’s an introduction…to the config format.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#23

Post by TylerE »

alephaleph wrote: post #14
junon wrote: post #10

> Can you spot the mistake? Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious. Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.

How could they make the mistake obvious? It's a mistake in a string value!

How about not making the very first thing on the page a confusing puzzle?

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#24

Post by junon »

cbb330 wrote: post #17
junon wrote: post #10

> Can you spot the mistake? Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious. Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.

This opinion is ironic because this is exactly what the author intended to describe -- the typo IS hard to find. The "Hello, World" example is nothing more than JSON, showing a string repeated 3 times. On the third time, "bill" is misspelled with "blil". The next tab shows how Dhall uses a variable definition to prevent this type of error.

I took it to mean "can you find the syntax error". It wasn't clear they meant the text

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#25

Post by beanjuiceII »

svnpenn wrote: post #5

{ home = "/home/bill" , privateKey = "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519" , publicKey = "/home/blil/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" } This is the most awkward abuse of formatting I've seen in a long time. Just allow/require a final trailing comma, and this nonsense goes away

I would actually prefer no comma's

  {:home        "/home/bill"
   :private-key "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519"
   :public-key  "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub"}

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#27

Post by aendruk »

cbb330 wrote: post #17
junon wrote: post #10

> Can you spot the mistake? Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious. Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.

This opinion is ironic because this is exactly what the author intended to describe -- the typo IS hard to find. The "Hello, World" example is nothing more than JSON, showing a string repeated 3 times. On the third time, "bill" is misspelled with "blil". The next tab shows how Dhall uses a variable definition to prevent this type of error.

I too spent the whole time scrutinizing the syntax and ignoring the values, since this is an intro to the language and not to Bill’s dotfiles. I was ultimately unable to deduce the presumed syntax error and independently came to the same misconclusion.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#28

Post by kukx »

I have been recently looking for a program that does a similar thing, ie simplifies creation of configs. And I did not find a suitable one by Googling. Then I realized the PHP is perfect for that and I already know it! The output of PHP does not have to be HTML or other web stuff, instead it can be a config file.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#30

Post by suby »

TylerE wrote: post #23
alephaleph wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could they make the mistake obvious? It's a mistake in a string value!

How about not making the very first thing on the page a confusing puzzle?

They should at least reveal the answer somewhere immediately close by. I couldn't spot the error after a few minutes, came to the comments to find out what it was. Not a great introduction because you're asking someone to spot an error in something they don't know the syntax or ruleset for.

The project looks cool though.

Post reply on HN